Have you seen my ofiice at Columbia Heights this year, with its beautiful park? If not, you ought to take a little trip and see what a wonderful place Columbia Heights is getting to be.
I infer, from words dropped here and there, that the average person, in thinking of Columbia Heights, thinks of it as a flat, level sweep of ground, with possibly a house here and there, a tree or two, a bunch of cows, and an uninteresting background—all of which is not so. There is no such scenic acreage anywhere near the Twin Cities. Turn to your right, or to your left, look straight ahead or backwards, and miles upon miles of wonderful country, dotted with lakes, rolling with hills and touched here and there with a column of smoke, make your senses reel with astonishment. People who live on a straight, unimaginative avenue, which they leave in the morning, and come to in the evening, walk like it. You can tell them on the avenue. They not only look it themselves, and are it, but they bring up their children in the same, flat, dull way that they themselves are living. Children of Columbia Heights are altogether different. They don’t look like the others. I saw a bunch of fifty or sixty the other day, clamoring up to the school house to be let in. Most of them with up-turned noses. Fresh air and hills and good lungs, always bring with them an open nostril, and an up-turned nose. They bring with them also a springy gait. The love of running, instead of loafing, and the love of the country with its lakes and trees, instead of the garbage can. Take the noses of people who live near the garbage can, and their nostrils are small, and their nose generally turned down to protect the lungs from evil smells.
I wonder if I have interested you! If I have, won’t you let me come to your house one evening, with a five-passenger car, and take you out over this wonderful property? You don’t have to buy. You won’t be annoyed by what is described in the novel as a “courteous salesman.” You can just be a human being, craving for fresh air. You can be so poor that buying a lot will be absolutely impossible. If, however, a ride to the Filtration Plant and City Reservoirs will make a happier man or woman of you, then I want to be your host.
-EDMUND G. WALTON, Manager 314 Nicollet Avenue
As advertised in Minneapolis Golden Jubilee, 1867-1917:
Ahistory of fifty years of civic and commercial progress …
